Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. These firmware and application software often contain software bugs. New versions of the firmware and software are periodically released to fix the bugs or to introduce new features, or both.
Problems may arise when supporting firmware updates in devices that contain file systems. For example, the location of information stored in such a file system often needs to be communicated to low level drivers or firmware components that need to access such information before any operating system services such as, for example, file systems, are available. There may also be a need to communicate status information to low-level drivers or firmware components before the operating system services that support such communication are available, for example, during power up or reboot.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.